The Making of Founding Fathers: Vikram Sarabhai, Qian Xuesen and the Global Space Age

Reiterated but scarcely questioned, the notion of the ‘founding father’ has long been a conspicuous trope in outer space historiography. Evoking Marcel Mauss’ concept of persona, originally introduced in 1938 and advanced by historians of science and technology in recent years, this poster interrogates the making of space stars and ‘father figures’ in two different, yet interrelated national settings: China and India. Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) and Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) are credited with having played equivalent roles for launching the two nations’ respective spaceflight programs. Whether remembered as ‘father of spaceflight’ or ‘space research pioneer,’ they dominate the respective historiographies of these emerging space powers. Drawing from a wide array of written and visual, biographical and autobiographical sources, this poster scrutinizes the interweaving dialectics between the making of ‘scientific’ celebrities and the creation of national spaceflight genealogies from the 1950s to the 1990s. With a view to interrogate the respective patrimonies, it examines how the fame of these global space personae was established.

The contemporary image of Qian Xuesen (1911-2009) appears as a patriotic, diligent and amiable role model from whom Chinese citizens should learn. However, Qian only became known as the “Father” of Chinese Spaceflight with these noble characters in the 1990s. Throughout his life, Qian's public image changed significantly according to Chinese domestic situations, such as the hostility against the US during the Korean War, the promotion of science and technology during the socialist construction, and the fanatic passion for communist ideal and class struggle during the late 1950s to the 1960s. This poster illustrates such changes of Qian’s public persona through newspaper articles, magazines, and propaganda posters. The image set-up of Vikram Sarabhai (1919-1971), on the other hand, witnesses two phases of development. The first phase happened after 1996 when he attained leadership in institutional spaceflight agencies. In between 1966 and 1971, the scientist’s own essays and citations of his speeches gained increasing presence in official newspapers and scientific journals. The second phase after his death played a fundamental role in establishing Sarabhai’s status at home and abroad. Various forms of image-making during this period range from memorial lectures, popular readings of space science, to commemorative stamps and republication of his essays, as will be shown in the poster.

Through this examination of the two space celebrities, the poster probes the interpersonal and transnational flux of spaceflight knowledge across borders. By scrutinizing Sarabhai and Qian’s activities in the global community of space technology, it presents an intra-regional network of space experts in connection to post-War Europe and the United States. At the same time, the image-making of Sarabhai and Qian provides insights into the political investment in outer space on a global scale. The respective national spaceflight genealogies embodied in the two figures contributes to mapping the global history of outer space, and addresses the apparently irresistible appeal of twentieth-century astroculture from a global perspective.

(This poster will supplement the accepted presentations at AHA session No. 182)